A Counselor Addresses Common Myths About Addiction

Hi, my name is Mary Spaulding, and I'm an addiction counselor. 

The thing that most people misunderstand about addiction—and I'm talking as a licensed professional counselor, a licensed alcohol and drug counselor, and former RN—they don't realize it is a chronic disease. People are not weak-willed and they can just quit tomorrow if they want to. I wish that were the case.

It is a brain disease, it is chronic; there's no cure for it, but you can arrest it. But the person who's got the addiction has got to be willing to do this on a daily basis.

I think the most important thing that I could tell a loved one who has someone suffering from addiction is that there really is help and hope out there. There are proven treatment programs that work; the main concern there is, it's a disease and if you will not go for help, you won't be able to get the help. 

But it's very important for the families to notice, and also another thing I would want to tell the family is they need to have education about substance abuse because they may be trying to help their loved one and kind of trying to rescue them and they're not helping them.

They can go to Al-Anon or Alateen—these are free support groups—and learn about this disease. And they need to do this because it is a family disease, also.

Enabling is when families think they're helping their loved one or they don't know what else to do so, for example, your spouse was drinking all night and can't go to work, and so the partner calls the employer and says he won't be in today because he's sick.

People do enabling without even realizing it because they don't know about this disease; they need to understand these things. My mom used to stop at the liquor store and get a sixpack for my father four times a week; my mother never drank a drop, but it was for him and because she didn't want to have a fight on her hands if she didn't do it—things like that.

There are a lot of times we can enable our loved ones and we're not helping them; in fact, they say you can love a drunk to death—and you really can!

When I pray about helping someone with an addiction, first of all I pray for myself, for wisdom and guidance; in other words, for God to tell me what to say. I will say, "Tell me, use me as a channel," so to speak, so that I will something that's going to help them.

As for the addict themselves, I really want to pray that they will open their eyes, that they will open their hearts, that they'll be willing to change and that they will discover what they've been doing to themselves and their loved ones, so that they'll begin to see the scope of the problem. 

I want God to give them hope because when they come in for help, they are so afraid, because I think they know what a train wreck their life is—and that's usually the case—and I want God to impress upon them, "You can change; you can have a better life. It doesn't have to be this way." I want God to give them hope because that's really what they need—to cut through the denial, which is a cardinal sign of addiction, and for them to realize that they need help.